Chapter Thirteen
Randy
An hour earlier…
When Titus left the room, the silence was deafening. Nixon wanted to practice, meaning...well, I wasn’t sure what, but while I didn’t want to deny our omega anything he wanted, I was also a little uncomfortable with having his first physical experience with only one of us present.
I wanted it to be all of us.
But how to say that? Drawing a deep breath, I prepared to try to explain, but to my amazement, Nixon was standing up and heading for the door. “What…?”
“Let’s hurry. We want to do this before Titus gets back.” But if he wanted to “do this,” why was he leaving? “I think there’s another door to the hallway, and we can surprise him.”
Bemused I followed the still-way-too-skinny-and-a-little-blotchy bear into the living room. “Where are we going?”
He opened a couple of doors and crowed in triumph. “Here it is. I noticed a store right down the street that should have everything.” Then he paused. “Do you have any money with you? For the surprise?”
“I have my debit card. What are we buying?”
“You’ll love it.” Grabbing my hand, he dragged me toward the elevator where a young man was just exiting. “We can’t possibly spend any time here without the basic comforts of life, can we?” We stepped inside, and he punched the ground-floor button.
As the doors slid closed, I tugged him closer to me, loving the feel of his rangy body against my beefier one. “Right. It is kind of spartan in there. What do you want? A new bed would be good. We can move it to the new place when it’s ready. Draperies, probably not, but they would brighten the place up.
I yammered along as we moved through the lobby and onto the street. Nixon took a sharp left. “No, not a bed,” he chided. “Necessities.”
“If you don’t think a strong, comfortable bed is a necessity for three bears,” I muttered, “you do have a lot to learn.” A lot I’d be delighted to help teach him. We passed a number of phone stores, restaurants, a music shop, and a mattress place I would have loved to visit, but Nixon sped right up to the doorway of a business whose expansive plate glass window was filled with the biggest screen I’d ever seen. A screen on which cartoonish characters did battle while cheers rang out from inside.
What fresh hell? This was a store my brother Barry would love. In fact, he did love it. As we entered the store, Barry’s was one of the first cheers I could identify. Rows of young shifters, mostly, but not all, male, sat in low leather chairs. Some wore virtual reality goggles and gloves, others operated more conventional joysticks. But all of them were playing—shudder—video games. Flashing lights and a cacophony of the first water made me want to run home to my bee roof garden.
“Barry!” Nixon called. “I got one of them here!”
My brother handed his joystick off to another bear he waved over and stood, chuckling. “I didn’t think you could do it. But weren’t you going to wait to set up a system at your new unit?”
Nixon, who had begun to vibrate once we walked inside, shook his head. “That was plan A. But once I got a look at Titus’s apartment, I had to move on to plan B.”
“Plan what?” I was sounding more idiotic by the moment.
Nixon turned a blinding smile on me. “Barry has been helping me set up the perfect gaming system for the three of us. So we can have fun together.”
“Not the fun I had in mind,” I grunted, but as uncertainty dimmed the sparkle in Nixon’s eyes, I pushed my doubts away. Our omega had asked us for nothing. And he only wanted something for us to do together. We wouldn’t be having sex all the time. Just hopefully a lot of it.
“I, umm…” Nixon trailed off, and Barry, casting me a glare, took over.
“I know gaming has never been your favorite thing, but shared hobbies are good for a relationship.”
I forced myself not to point out he wasn’t the brother who actually had a relationship. “Go on.”
“So, I told Nixon that if we made sure there were games even you tech-blind oafs can manage, you might be willing to give it a try.”
“Mmm hmm. So, this system...it’s a basic TV and a thingamahoojie box with some controller things, right?”
I’d unlamped the genie. Nixon and Barry burst into a chorus of explanation that blended into a shrieking whine in my head. I had never been into games, never really played at all, but within fifteen minutes, employees of the store—which it turned out Barry had a partial interest in—were trundling wheeled carts down the sidewalk toward Titus’s building. Nixon assured me it was only a “small portion” of the system, and Barry refused any payment, calling it our mating gift.
With speed never seen outside of a video game, the dudes had the big screen TV and everything else we would need “to survive” assembled in the bedroom. The poor bed was shoved into the corner, replaced with the triple low-theater chair/beanbag chair combo set that our omega insisted was ideal for our “fun.”
They took the mountains of cardboard, foam, and plastic with them as they left, and I allowed Nixon to push me into the left-hand seat and settle in the one next to me. “Ready?” he asked. “Oh crap.”
“What now?” Irritation was beginning to replace overwhelmed in my emotional palette. “Did you forget the store window?”
“No, I forgot snacks. Do you think Titus has anything good to eat in the kitchen?”
I snorted. “No. But I can call for whatever you want. Chinese sound good?”
His jaw dropped. “Chopsticks will slow us down. Finger food! And nothing too sticky.”
“No honey cakes, then?”
He tilted his head, considering. “I’d go salty. Chips, pretzels are good. M&Ms for sweet because they don’t melt all over you.”
“Any reason I can’t have a beer?”
He shrugged. “If you want to slow your reactions. I’m going to beat you anyway.”
Of course, he was.